The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time (20 page)
Holly shields them from the sporadic rain and talks.
“So, is it weird?” she asks. “Is it weird doing the reenactment thing as a . . . you being . . . you know?”
The Minotaur knows what he needs. He feels for the ⅝-inch socket.
“Not so much,” he says.
“I think Took would really like it. The battle stuff, the costumes.”
“Uniforms,” the Minotaur says. He’s surprised at the ease with which words fall out of his mouth in her presence. The Minotaur is on his back beneath the Odyssey, his snout nearly rubbing the undercarriage. His bottom half, his human self, Holly keeps dry.
“Thank you so much for doing this,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you and dumbass in there.”
The Minotaur hears bemusement in her voice. They both hear thunder rolling over the distant mountain. If he cocks his head just right he can see her legs, the wet hems of her jeans.
“This trip,” she says. “This trip with Tookus is . . . It’s a hard one.”
The Minotaur turns the ratchet just to hear it click.
“He doesn’t really know where we’re going,” she says. “I promised him, I promised myself I’d give him one last adventure.”
The Minotaur pulls the strut free from its bracket. He thinks about the places he’s seen and been during his time in Pennsylvania. Pigeon World. Peachy’s Miniature America. Squaw Caverns. Somewhere there’s a coal-mine fire that’s been burning underground for two decades. The Minotaur doesn’t remember the abandoned town’s name.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says.
“Pittsburgh,” she says. “We’re headed to Pittsburgh. I found a place . . .”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, his utterance bouncing off the undercarriage.
“I can’t,” she says. “I mean, I don’t always make the best decision, the right choice. Who does? But I can’t do it anymore by myself. I have to get on with my own life.”
He reaches out and places the part by Holly’s bucket.
“And now all this mechanical nonsense,” Holly says.
“No,” the Minotaur says. Not nonsense.
“Why do you think he told us?” Holly says. “That Roger dude, I mean. Why’d he tell us about all them dead kids?”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur grunts from beneath the junked van. His senses, his horns, all of him trapped happily there. It is futile to question almost anybody’s motivation for almost any action. But he’s willing to imagine some fraction of goodness into the junkman’s equation.
“Fucking weirdo,” Holly says.
“Fucking dead Amish kids,” Holly says.
“Fucking killer, and fucking mothers and fathers and their fucking Amish forgiveness,” Holly says.
The Minotaur breathes deeply.
“Truth be told,” she says, “Tooky probably won’t know the difference. They’ll take good care of him. He won’t remember. He’ll forget me in a week.”
There is always potential for magic in a salvage yard. Always. The pig stampede is right around the corner. Always.
“He doesn’t remember our mom or dad. We have to be there on Monday. And the money in the jug, well . . . They’ll take good care of him. Won’t they?”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“I promised him,” she says. “One last adventure. And now . . .”
“Unngh, soo . . . sorry,” the Minotaur says, or tries to.
Holly mishears. “Hey!” she says. “You’re right! That’s it!”
“Mmmnn?” the Minotaur says, but inflection is difficult for him. His old tongue swallows up nuance.
“Old Scald,” she says. She puts her hand on his leg as she talks. Squeezes his calf. “You can take us! We’ll watch you fight. Maybe Took can wear a costu . . . a uniform!”
In the salvage yard there is always the potential for magic. The Minotaur opens his mouth, and the clouds burst overhead. Hunkers down, since it’s time for the truth. The Minotaur opens his mouth again, and the rain retreats. The Minotaur searches for his tongue inside the moment. He should confess. He should tell Holly the truth about what happened at Old Scald Village, and why he can’t take them there. About his horns and what they do. About his shame.
“Unngh, yes,” he says.
“Okay,” he says.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Mmm,” she says. Nothing more. There’s been enough talking.
Holly starts to sing. Softly. The Minotaur doesn’t recognize the song. No matter. The Minotaur lied. He has sung before, in a different life, in another salvage yard. The Minotaur finished his task awhile ago but wants to stay in the presence of her song. Each note a raindrop in the endless desert of his eternity. The Minotaur wants to drown in those notes. No. Each note a white-hot pinprick in the abject black of his always. The blind Minotaur takes his time. Wallows in it. Sweet time. Sweet time.
“What do you like most?” Holly asks.
“Mmmnn?”
“About the reenacting business. What do you like most?”
“Mmmnn, the dying,” the Minotaur says.
“Oh,” Holly says.
“Okay,” he says at last. “Done.”
The Minotaur pulls himself from beneath the Odyssey, gets to his knees. Holly stands. The umbrella, lively in a sudden gust, almost pulls her off balance. The Minotaur almost reaches for her. Holly grabs hold of the Minotaur.
“I like these horns,” she says.
“It’s too bad . . . ,” she says, and leaves the statement incomplete.
Just as they’re about to go back into the office Holly asks the Minotaur not to tell Danny about Tookus about the finality of the trip.
“I’m making the best decision, aren’t I?” she asks. “The right choice?”
“Mmmnn,” he says.
“Thanks.”
Holly opens the door in the middle of Danny’s story.
“Her daddy was a state trooper,” Danny says. “I was thirteen. She was fifteen.”
“Hey, there,” Roger says, eyeing the Minotaur’s handful of auto parts. The sousaphone hasn’t moved. “Find everything all right?”
Danny drums his fingers on the countertop. The room smells like pot smoke.
“The very first time we ever got hot and heavy was in the front seat of her daddy’s patrol car. I stuck my finger inside, and she started kicking. Kicked on the blue lights, kicked on the siren. I was still inside her when he busted out the window with his gun.”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“Hey,” Roger says, gesturing at the woodcarver. “I was telling dick-for-brains here that my shanty choir has a gig at Ag-Fest this coming weekend. You should come!”
“What’s an Ag-Fest?” Holly asks. “Sounds rancid.”
“We celebrate our glorious agrarian culture,” Roger says. “There’s all kinds of funky music and food and stuff. We’ll be spreading the shanty love at noon. Come see us. Hell’s bells, come sing with us! Our motto is, ‘All you have to be is loud. ’”
“Unngh.”
“I don’t do loud,” Holly says. “Right now, anyway. How much do I owe you?” She looks back and forth between Roger and the Minotaur.
“You’re all set,” Roger says, giving the football helmet a solid thump.
“You are the prince of pirates, Roger,” the woodcarver says.
They head for the door. Jolly Roger licks his lips and fingers the valves.
“So, when are you going to give up that sexy necklace?” Roger asks.
“This thing?” Danny Tanneyhill asks, pulling the saw blade from inside his shirt.
It glints even in the fluorescent light. The Minotaur sees it reflected in Holly’s eyes.
“This little old thing, you’ll never get your hands on, brother. It’s the source of all my secret powers.”
Roger is blowing long and hard on the sousaphone when they exit.
“We’ll take the turnpike,” Danny says. “Be home in no time.”
THE PENNSYLVANIA TURNPIKE
is three hundred and sixty miles long, beginning to end.
But who would do such a thing? The Minotaur would. Beginning to end. End.
The pickup truck hurtling through this midday, this midweek, mid-storm, holds an odd trinity.
But who would do such a thing? The Minotaur hunkers in the bed. There is no other way.
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale.
An obbligato of rain and roaring traffic attends the journey.
The Allegheny Front is one hundred and eighty miles long. Roughly.
This valley is drenched. The Minotaur is drenched.
There were seven tunnels on the turnpike. Now there are four. Where do old tunnels go?
There is the migratory bird flyway. Thermals—lift and loft. The sun’s ransom.
A tale of a fateful trip. The ecclesiastic earth. Grounded gods.
“I like these horns,” she said. The Minotaur will not kowtow to hope.
The internal combustion engine is easy to understand. The carburetor sucks fuel, fires the plugs. Too, there are five lug nuts per wheel. The truck and gravity are one. Orbit this. Orbit that.
There is a moon (lug nut) up there, behind the storm clouds, more or less, two hundred thirty-eight thousand nine hundred miles away. The sun, farther flung. The rest of the celestial menagerie, too.
The Minotaur sits with exactly two horns in the back of the truck. Soaked. Sopping. Head down, gyres of rainwater spiraling from his horn tips. Okay.
The Minotaur has a thick snout. The Minotaur has two eyes, two lungs, one heart.
The Minotaur is at the mercy of gravity, too. Believe it or not. Makes no difference.
Holly has a heart.
It is not made of pine.
Of Holly’s heart, this much can be said: “I like these horns.”
“The dying,” he said.
“I like these horns.”
The veins and vessels that carry her blood might just measure seventy-five thousand miles. If you laid them out end to end. But who’d do such a thing? In the face of desire it is all meaningless. A drop in the bucket of want.
THE MINOTAUR LIFTS HIS WATERLOGGED
noggin when the truck slows in the long sweeping curve before the tollbooth. He wipes his eyes, but it does little good. He is rain drenched. Saturated.
The truck swerves when Danny reaches into his pockets for money.
“Be careful,” Holly says. The Minotaur hears it clearly.
Looking backward, he sees the four lanes of turnpike traffic (two each eastbound and westbound) flare too quickly into and out of the wide bank of tollbooths.
Cash Only. E-ZPass.
Watches the drivers in the opposite lanes fight for position as they funnel down into one unforgiving pair of lanes. Watches, too, the swell of vehicles slowing and piling up behind him. Them.
“You still back there?” Holly asks.
The Minotaur shudders. It is not the hiss of air brakes on the semis rattling up on either side that disturbs him, despite the gritty spray of rainwater from the massive wheels. Nor the innocuous couple in the innocuous sedan just to his right, the woman pretending to sleep on the man’s lap. It’s not even the rust-pocked camo-painted compact SUV riding up on the truck’s rear bumper, revving and revving its piteous little four-cylinder engine, the driver clearly glaring at the Minotaur as if the bottleneck of traffic is somehow his fault. No. None of this perturbs the soggy Minotaur. What bothers him, hunched there in the back of the truck in the April rain, what gripes his craw is the easy laughter he hears from the cab of the truck.
“You still back there?”
The truck lurches forward. The Minotaur doesn’t answer.
The SUV nearly rear-ends the truck. It skids, stalls, the engine sputtering to an uncertain stop. Rain steams away on the hot hood. The Minotaur sees the feathered arrow shaft jammed into the hole where a radio antenna ought to be. Danny Tanneyhill inches ahead, unaware. The driver of the SUV gets out, in his Walmart security guard uniform, and opens his hood, whacks hard at something with a screwdriver. The Minotaur could be of some help here. If asked. The driver goes back, turns the ignition, and after several weak gyrations the engine catches and spits back to life. He does not need the Minotaur’s help. Does not want it. Would not accept it. The driver comes back to slam the hood, turns to the Minotaur with one hand at the ready on the pepper spray at his belt, aims the other hand, middle finger up high, then pointed pistol-like.
“Bang,” the man says.
Someone behind him blows a horn.
There is more than hatred in his eyes. No. Eye. One good eye. The other is covered by a milky blue caul. It’s like a tiny planet is orbiting in his eye socket. But the good eye rages.
“Bang bang.”
“How are you holding up?” Holly asks through the screen. Breaking the spell.
The exchange at the booth is quick enough, but as they pull away the Minotaur catches a glimpse of himself reflected—refracted, maybe—in the pair of bi-fold glass windows hissing shut. For one infernal instant his big head is bifurcated and multiplied, erupting from and spreading out on both sides of the toll collector’s massive afro.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. The Guptas have warned him more than once about Ravana, the demon king.
The Minotaur tucks his snout and waits. He’s in a pickle. A pickle of his own making. Tomorrow he’s agreed to take the redhead and her brother to Old Scald Village. To watch him fight and die.
Tomorrow is too far away to worry about. Soon enough they’re back on Business 220, coming from the far side of Joy. The SUV and its angry driver are on their tail briefly, roaring around them. Good riddance, the Minotaur thinks. But the driver whips off the road without signaling and skids to a stop on a steep dirt path into dark woods. Danny has to slam the brakes hard.
The Minotaur sees them on the rear of the SUV, three bumper stickers:
There’s a Place for All God’s Creatures, Right Next to the Potatoes & Gravy
Gun Control Activists Taste Like Chicken
Poach This, Bitch!
Good riddance.
THE JUDY-LOU MOTOR LODGE
looks good in the rain.
The concrete goose, headless still, sits dressed in a yellow rain slicker by the office door. Gifted there by Tookus, most likely.
“What shall we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning!” Danny Tanneyhill sings at the top of his lungs, and not half bad.